Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/546

 AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN CREATION MYTH.

BY PROF. A. WIEDEMANN.

ancient Egypt the closest connection existed between religious sentiment and the entire mode of thought and feeling of the people. The ancient Egyptian was distinguished—as was observed by the nations of classical antiquity—by great piety. In all his actions, even the most commonplace, some part was played by gods or demons. Awake and asleep, from birth to death, and far beyond that limit, he was surrounded by spirits; some good, who gave him existence, some evil, who studied to ruin his fortune. He must become and remain master of them, if he would attain any object, if his health and life were not to be endangered, or unless he was ready to abandon hope of a blessed life beyond the grave.

This intimate bond between faith and life was still more closely tied by the fact that religion did not form a distinct circle in the civilization of the inhabitants of the Nile valley and never lost its most intimate connection with the development of the same. Religion, there, never became a self-contained dogma, its fountains always continued to flow. There were no sacred scriptures, from which every doctrine must take its foundation and justification, and to the contents of which every Egyptian was obliged to hold fast or appear as an apostate from the faith of his fathers. There were no poets whose mythological elaborations could control and systematize religious thought. The latter path was found by the Greeks in order to arrive at a consistent faith without binding it in the fetters of a system. Homer and Hesiod created their mythological ideas, as is reported by Herodotus, II. 53, Xenophanes, and others. They did not freely invent their doctrines, but smoothed over inconsistencies in the existing myths, connected the various legends, and thus